Negroni Stories

There is an alternative to the classic Count Camillo story, where the Negroni was invented when said count asked his barman to fortify his Americano.

In recent years, a verified descendant of another Negroni family, Noel Negroni, has built a case for his ancestor’s founding of the cocktail, stating that the cocktail’s founder is in fact General Pascal Olivier de Negroni de Cardi, a Corsican by birth, who was born in the island’s Castle of San Colombano in 1829. The evidence is based on a letter in 1886 from Pascal to his older brother Roche which reads: “…Incidentally, did you know that the vermouth-based cocktail that I invented in Saint Louis is a great hit at the Lunéville officers club?” Pascal is said to have created the drink in honour of his marriage to Blanche Gérard-Fontallard (May 6th, 1857) when he was stationed at the French colony of Saint Louis in Senegal, West Africa. There is one small problem; Campari was not invented until 1860 well after said marriage. So while it might have had vermouth in it, it is not the Negroni which we know today.

While similar cocktails are mentioned throughout the 20s and 30s, none carry the Negroni name.

Luis Bunuel is claimed to have invented the Bunueloni, which is identical to today’s Negroni but with a fraction less gin. Luis famously collaborated on the 1929 ‘Un Chien Andalou’ with Dali featuring the women’s eye sliced with a razor blade. He said that the Bunueloni should ‘be drunk in a bar mid- afternoon’. Not just any bar, he specified it should be “an exercise in solitude. It must be quiet, dark and very comfortable – no music of any kind, not more than a dozen tables and a client who doesn’t like to talk”.

Around the same time, Albert at the Hotel Chatham invented Camparinete which has triple the gin and half the vermouth and bitters of today’s Negroni and featured in the 1929 Cocktails de Paris. The Camparinete made the same way also appeared in 1934 by Boothby’s World Drinks Company and was attributed to William Boothby (even though he had died in 1930). Finally Dundonian Harry MacElhone who made his name at Ciro's Club in London, before setting up Harry’s New York Bar in Paris was awarded Prix d'Honneur at the International Bartenders' Contest, Paris, 1929 for the Tunnel Cocktail, which is the same as today Negroni aside from the vermouth being a 50/50 mixture of sweet and dry vermouth.

In Italy, there is no written mention of a Negroni until the end of WWII, when Mussolini and his Fascists, who had ruled Italy since 1922 had gone. Under Fascist rule the word ‘cocktail’ had been banned and degenerate, foreign habits such as cocktail drinking were discouraged by his brown shirts. In 1947, the Negroni recipe was printed in Cocktail Portfolio as 1/3 gin, 1/3 vermouth, 1/3 Campari, on the rocks with a twist of orange and a splash of soda. At the end of this same year, Orson Welles, who was filming ‘Black Magic’ in Rome, wrote to gossip columnist Erskine Johnson about ‘New Negronis’ saying “bitters are excellent for your liver, the gin is bad for you” and that “they balance each other out”, which he shared in his syndicated column across the Hearst newspapers. Hemingway mentioned Negroni’s in Across the River and into the Trees (1950) and The Good Lion (1951), which he wrote in Venice in 1948 In 1950, it featured in Horace Sutton’s 1950 “Footloose in Italy.” And by 1954 in London in barman Eddie Clarke’s 1954 ‘Shake again with Eddie’ but with double the gin of Cocktail Portfolio Negroni.

In the USA, the ’new’ Negroni is mentioned in House And Garden in 1952 and Harper’s Bazaar in 1954 which is the first time that I found when the Negroni is referred to as “a balance of equal thirds from three bottles that are standard bar tray equipment” and when the soda is dropped. By 1960, Ian Fleming featured the drink in his short story ‘Risico’ where “Bond nodded. ‘A Negroni. With Gordon’s, please.’ The waiter walked back to the bar. ‘Negroni. Uno. Gordon’s.’”.

By the late 70s and early eighties, the Negroni like many traditional cocktails faded away with a comeback starting in the mid nineties, but taking off in the past 15 years championed by the likes of uber fan Antony Bourdain who said

“I think the Negroni is the perfect cocktail because it is three liquors that I don’t particularly like. I don’t like Campari, and I don’t like sweet vermouth and I don’t particularly love gin. But you put them together with that little bit of orange rind in a perfect setting… It’s just: It sets you up for dinner, in a way it makes you hungry, sands the edges off the afternoon. As an after dinner, it’s settling. It is both aperitif and digestive. It’s a rare drink that can do that.” He also warned, “it hits you like a freight train after four or five.”